The Study of Indonesian Politics

Abstract

The study of the politics of the independent nation Indonesia is, by definition, a post-WWII undertaking. Indonesian independence was declared on August 17th 1945, in a simple proclamation read by Sukarno, who became Indonesia’s first President. Indonesia is one of the so-called new states of the post-WWII period and the study of its politics is influenced by a range of factors specific to the post-WWII period. In terms of international politics, Indonesia achieved its independence in the early days of the Cold War. The international or external factors which influenced the outcome of the struggle between Indonesian republican and Dutch colonial forces and the conduct of domestic politics in Indonesia, owe something to the exigencies of the Cold War.

The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.

(Said, 1995, p. 283)

Fields of analysis often develop a convention for introducing their object. Such tropes come to seem too obvious and straightforward to question… Yet the visual imagery of an opening paragraph can establish the entire relationship between the textual analysis and its object… Objects of analysis do not occur as natural phenomena, but are partly constructed by the discourse that describes them. The more natural the object appears, the less obvious this discursive construction will be.

(Mitchell, 1995, p. 130)